1001 Albums Summary

What strikes me about Tea for the Tillerman is that almost everything around the songs works, the new arrangements are warm, the playing is confident, and there's something genuinely moving about Yusuf revisiting these tracks fifty years later. But the one piece that didn't shift enough for me is his voice itself. It's not that it's worse, just that it doesn't pull me in the way the rest of the album does, and that mismatch is enough to keep this from being something I'd actually put on. I don't dislike it, I just keep wishing someone else were singing it.